A Japan-based native-speaking English teacher (and compulsive diarist) blogs on the subject of autonomous EFL learning (aka angst-ridden self-doubting under the guise of professional inquiry).

March 11, 2006

Critical pedagogy and negotiated syllabus

Those staff members who push forgreater student participation in learning have one importantargument: most students learn much more when they are activelyinvolved in controlling their own learning rather than being passiverecipients of material provided by teachers. Yet this argument winsthe day only in a tiny minority of cases. There are two sources ofopposition.

This quotation is relevant to the debate that surfaced here recently between the "traditionalists vs progressives", "teacher-centred" supporters vs "student-centred" supporters.